Content Marketing Measurement and Performance.
How to gauge performance and optimise your efforts.
6 of 6.
We’ve reached the final chapter in this series of blogs, which I hope has helped shed some light on why it’s important to create a content marketing strategy for your business, and how you might best go about it.
Return on Investment (ROI)?
Measuring the ROI of content marketing is challenging to say the least. It’s extremely difficult to calculate the sum of content marketing activity (traditionally synonymous with sales revenue), and link this to an organisation’s bottom line.
However, content marketing is now widely recognised as being a crucial activity that contributes to achieving wider business goals – attracting new customers and retaining existing customers - while influencing profitable customer behaviour.
Content marketing is a cumulative, profitable process that generates quantitative and qualitative organisational value.”
For example, think about the metrics used to measure social media. Marketers track the number of likes or shares and monitor comments to gauge customer sentiments. Who knows how many of these “engagements” will ultimately lead to a sale? Yet, these metrics are still worth monitoring.
Furthermore, content is often designed to inform, educate, and entertain audiences – that may or may not become customers further down the line. How is it possible to measure how informed or entertained large audiences are? And how can marketers track word of mouth in terms of whether a sale resulted from a recommendation given more than 6 months ago? The answer is it’s not that easy! But most marketers appreciate the long-term benefits that word of mouth can bring and the concept of building brands and communities.
The science bit - content marketing metrics
Metrics are measurable values used by marketers to demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing activity, including content marketing across all channels.
Your metrics will ultimately relate to the content marketing goals and SMART objectives you have already set, so you will need to develop relevant metrics and KPI’s to measure cost savings (in line with marketing budgets), campaigns (at a tactical level) and business growth goals. (Refer to blog 2).
Metrics can be broadly grouped into three categories - discovery (e.g., unique visitors/ views, clicks/ CTR). Engagement (e.g., time on page, bounce rate, comments), and conversion (e.g., leads, enquiries and sales and satisfaction ratings).
What is happening right now?
You need accurate real time data to help you gauge the performance of your content marketing efforts. There are several tools on the market that will help you do this.
Buzzsumo can help you monitor how your content has performed across all social media channels in one easy-to-access location. And Google Analytics is a powerful web analytics tool that provides a gamut of free reporting features to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts via your website and social. And it can also be integrated with Google Ads.
Google Analytics allows you to better understand your customers so that you can develop personalised content for them and ultimately increase your conversion rates and profitable return. I would recommend reading this article by Neil Patel if you are interested in finding out more.
While an in-depth study of Google Analytics will provide you with a methodical and data driven approach to improving your content marketing it takes an experienced marketer to track and monitor content marketing effectively.
For less experienced or technical savvy content marketers, a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable as you experiment with different forms of content or vary the look and feel, brand voice, or time of posting, for example.
4 useful ways to help you optimise your content
Buffer described as “Simpler social media tools for authentic engagement” is a scheduling/ publishing tool with analytics that allows you to measure and optimise your campaigns.
Compelling CTA’s. Creating compelling Call’s to Action are effective in driving and increasing conversion rates. These can be achieved through attractive, good design, high visibility, actionable text using short command phrases that convey a sense of urgency and state a clear benefit to the audience.
Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is acceptable to use to persuade people to take immediate action. So, you might use a countdown clock to an event, or offer limited places only!
And of course, there’s also Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO increases discoverability of your content and can be achieved through well-structured title tags, descriptive metatags loaded with customer benefits and keyword-rich URLs. It’s also important to optimise images and videos for search engines too.
Give it a year!
Although content may be king, to respect the words of Neil Patel, it can take up to a year to see any real rewards or return on your content marketing investment.
I hope you have enjoyed the series!
Contact me by phone, email or set up a free 30-minute discovery call today for assistance with your content marketing plans.